How my team see me in here (Re: I need your opinion, please

[archiver]

Posted by Ken Leung at 05/24/2001 4:27 AM EST


College Student on team #192, Gunn Robotics Team, from Henry M. Gunn Senior High School.



I first know about this forum from Daniel Lehrbaum, a former GRT team leader AND a regular message-contributor who used to post on the forum back at 1999. Back then, only him and a couple members truly understood the importance of this place, and only Daniel posted on the forum while other simply come in and read about important information...

At the end of his year, I noticed how he is always looking at this web page wherever there is a computer with Internet access, and I caught my eyes in this web page and figured out how great this forum is as well. I started reading everything, and started "posting" by answering some simple questions by quoting the rulebook.

At the beginning of the 2001 competition, I was still the only one in the team reading and posting in the forum, even though I tried to tell GRT members about this place. After kick-off, I stayed with the team for another week during winter break, and during that time, I would sit in front of the computer half the time and read the forum. That's when my postings started to pick up. ;-)

After I got back to Berkeley, I found my eyes glued to the monitor screen when ever I am not in class, reading all new messages during the first week, furiously reading and replying every single minute... That's when I know I will be committed to this forum more than my weekends in GRT.

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So, what do my team think about me posting in here~? I am not exactly sure, but somehow I got the feeling that my team started coming in here more frequently because I am so committed in here. They understand that the work time I have with GRT is a bigger priority than posting, so they never rejected or have any negative feelings about what I do in here.

I am certainly one of the few who does actual posting, while I observed around 5~6 person posting very few messages. It's because most of them are not familiar with the Chief Delphi Forum "posters" and how things work in here. Even I took a while to be brave enough to join in discussions. It is especially harder for us West coast teams since we are so far from east coast teams.

My teammates don¡¦t fully know how much friends I made in this place. To them, this place is only an information board, so they never really tried to figure everything out. The California regional doesn't help much neither because little of those teams post in this place. It was until Nationals when my team got to see how many people know me from this forum, and their feeling about this can be represented by one sentence: "Wow that's so cool!" They never minded me being away from the team-visiting friends, because I am not with the team all the time anyway.

I think that even though this forum is open to everyone from any place, not all of those people take full advantage of this place. Most of the people spending a lot of time in here are FIRST-a-holics who are really dedicated to the FIRST competition, who also see the bigger picture of FIRST instead of only doing a year long project. So it is hard for everyone to do what I do in here. However, I feel that it is important us ¡§posters¡¨ let the rest of the group know what goes on in here. Make sure they understand this competition isn¡¦t just about building a robot each year.